By Lauren Phillips | The Coast
Over 5,000 education workers—including teaching assistants, custodians, bus drivers, early childhood educators, librarians and cafeteria workers—could go on strike as early as mid-January if bargaining over key issues breaks down.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) NS, representing school support staff across eight provincial education sectors, voted 94% in favour of a strike mandate last Thursday, Oct. 24.
This means the union has voted overwhelmingly in favour of job action if good-faith bargaining over collective agreements stalls or conciliation fails. All CUPE members work under the protection of negotiated contracts, or collective agreements, which are bargained between the union and its employer—in this case, the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, the EECD. These collective agreements expired in March. The union has been bargaining for new contracts since the summer.
“Our workers are very underpaid and overworked,” says Shelley McNeil, the president of CUPE Local 5047, representing 1,900 workers in the Halifax Regional Centre for Education. “We’re working short-staffed on a daily basis—and these issues need to be addressed.” That’s why McNeil calls Thursday’s strike vote result “extremely important.”
So, why wouldn’t a strike happen before the new year?
“There’s a protocol to follow,” says McNeil. The protocol: “We have faith that we’ll have good bargaining; we allocate time for enough bargaining; or if we need to, we apply for conciliation—there’s always a plan ahead of time.”
McNeil says a mid-January strike is “the earliest for us because we have to follow that process.”
What’s causing the rift at this point in the process? The lack of a common table for CUPE’s eight local provincial education unions to bargain directly with the province at.
Since bargaining began this summer, CUPE NS has been asking the province to meet them at a common table to address the union’s common proposals—the things that all locals and members want. For example, common proposals focus on “violence in schools, on overwork and shortage of staff and wages,” says McNeil. Can these proposals be solved at local bargaining tables? “Not to my knowledge,” she says, “because anything to do with money happens at the provincial table.”
Weeks before the start of the school year, CUPE and the Nova Scotia School Board Council of Unions—which is made up of the presidents of CUPE’s eight provincial education locals—released a worker-led review on violence in their workplaces called Safe Staff, Safe Schools.
Union for 5,000 staff wants action on “crisis of violence in public schools” from NS education department
Report findings included:
- “65% of school staff said they witnessed or experienced violence in schools on a weekly basis; 31% experience violence daily.”
- “At the Halifax Regional Centre for Education, over 600 incidents were reported from September 2023 to March 2024, and almost 70% were from school support staff.”
- “Of the 5,000 CUPE members working in schools, 83% are women.”
The report shared first-hand experiences of support staff across the province who are working multiple jobs to stay afloat despite the mental and physical toll of experiencing violence at work:
- “I have been in rooms where things have been thrown in anger. I have had to block hits from one student to another in which the victim is wheelchair-bound and unaware of the occurrence. I have watched coworkers be bitten, scratched, and yelled at. I have heard racial slurs be shouted at coworkers. We continue as we know these children need us and helping them is our passion, but I feel we are underpaid. This kind of role is one where you need to go home and unwind, not go to a second job afterwards.”
- “I have a plan to live in a tent behind our school next winter because I can’t afford rent anymore.”
- “I have to work so many different jobs; I am working all the time. My health can’t keep up.”
Common bargaining proposals for all education locals are outlined in an open petition on CUPE NS’s website that calls on the provincial government to address violence in schools to “ensure both students and staff are safe and supported” by following five steps, including:
- “Improving compensation and staffing levels for school support staff: stagnant wages and growing demand in their jobs has resulted in many workers leaving the field.”
- “Improving training for staff.”
- “Stop excluding school support staff from participating in the development and implementation of strategies, policies and programs to address violence in schools: school support staff in Nova Scotia have been trying to sound the alarm on this issue for years with no success, and this cannot continue.”
McNeil says these steps involve funding, which means they’re most effectively addressed at a common provincial table. Yet, the EECD has not provided this.
A release issued Sep. 12 by the Nova Scotia School Board Council of Unions says this is an attempt “to sow seeds of division” between CUPE’s eight education sectors and “a deliberate move as it slows down bargaining by forcing us to talk about logistics, instead of proposals.”
The release says, “if we give in and start to bargain provincial proposals separately, the employer will take full advantage of the separate tables and attempt to bargain inequality into our contracts.
“We know that the EECD is fine with major disparities between locals as we’ve spent the past year harmonizing wages across the province to address just that. This is a tactic to cultivate resentment and discontent amongst workers.”
Hence, the recent strike vote while bargaining is ongoing and months ahead of potential job action.
“It’s always important when bargaining that our members show a strong voice of solidarity,” McNeil says. “It also shows our employers that our members are willing to take action if significant needs are not met [and that] members can say, ‘These things are important to us, so, even though the hope is for good bargaining, we are willing to do what needs to be done so our voices are heard.’”
McNeil says details of what’s being discussed at the table are kept confidential to protect the bargaining process. “I will say that some talks are continuing, and some are moving toward conciliation.” The hope, says McNeil, is that “we’re able to continue bargaining and to negotiate—that’s always what everyone wants for their locals, that our locals and our members achieve a contract that is worthy of what they do and is worthy of all their hard work and dedication. That’s what our goal will continue to be.”
As of Sunday Oct. 27, Nova Scotia is in election season. The Coast reached out to the EECD after CUPE’s overwhelming strike vote to find out whether the province will meet the union at a common table.
The Department of Finance and Treasury Board for the Labour Relations file sent a response, which read: “education entities are legally separate from each other and are not required to negotiate collective agreements together,” and that “while we always encourage parties to continue bargaining to find common ground required to achieve a fair settlement, during the election period, entities are not in a position to conclude an agreement.”
This means collective bargaining in the public sector is typically paused during an election period because, in this case, negotiators for the Department of Education can’t make commitments to CUPE which would be binding to the next provincial government.
Thus, with an early provincial election called for Nov. 26, it seems unlikely the province will engage CUPE at a common table before then, reducing the bargaining time to reach a deal before the workers could strike in January.
